I am sitting in my hotel room in Yangon quite excited about getting back to Bangkok tomorrow morning. I have received so many e mails from people in the west telling me how crazy I am to still be here. Thankfully the Chinese disaster has finally put Myanmar off the front pages for a while. I only wish that if the Chinese disaster had to happen that it happened earlier in the week to save me from the barrage of e mails telling me to get out of Myanmar.
Yes, Myanmar is a fascist state. It is run by a junta of generals through fear and intimidation. Yes, people felt that they had to vote yes in the referendum or face serious consequences. Yes, they do everything they can to centralize power in their own hands such as controlling the relief effort and not letting the outside world take their supplies to their destinations, enforce quotas on gasoline, issue licenses for all gatherings of more than a few people and censor e mail and so on but the Myanmar people are resilient and purposeful. I went for a walk last night on the main street of Yangon and frankly, the same stores and hawkers that I met the last time were still there selling their wares. Individuals were sitting on the sidewalk cafes drinking their coffee and talking. Restaurants were full of people watching the soccer game on T.V. I was in an Internet café and I was shocked that the Myanmar guy beside me opened a sports site on football and was carefully examining the latest scores. The only difference was that the generators were working overtime because there is still very little electricity, but even when there was electricity a few weeks ago,it went out every few hours anyway so this is not much of a difference. Life simply goes on.
I did meet with a British Embassy official last night who finally took an hour off to have coffee and she talked about her frustration of organizing relief and on the policy level figuring out how to get the Myanmar government to allow foreign relief to even enter the country. After I finished, I asked here whether it would be safe to walk downtown and she just looked at me quizzically. Yangon is the safest city in the world she said to me. I was accosted by beggars and little kids chasing after me asking me for money, but that happened the last time I was here also.
One of the eternal questions for me is if Buddhist philosophy contributes to the ability of the fascist government to exist. The philosophy I am referring to is the notion of fate and the belief that the more good you do in this life the more merit you build up for the next life. Does this lead to passivity? From what I have read and discussed with people here, the answer is no. There is lots of resistance, but you have to be on the inside to know about it. You will read a great example in one of my earlier blog entries about the saint that I met.
I am excited, as I said to be leaving, but believe that the work I did here was critical. Education is obviously the key to progress in Myanmar and our five or six sites are furthering that cause.
Last night, I did sit with some Israeli’s, Sri Lanken and Americans as they were discussing their plight. They finally got in to the country and were prepared to help by delivering rice to the monasteries, helping in hospitals and so on but no foreigners are allowed into the impacted area. There are road blocks and trespassing is not allowed. Clearly the government wants to remain in control and put them in the best light, perhaps wants to coordinate distribution but the charities also want to be getting political as opposed to humanitarian credit for what they are doing. For example, in the news last night I saw goods being put on a plane in Bangkok that had a huge American poster tagged all over it.
Finally, when I got tired of hearing their complaining, I gave them a way to donate their money through our Singaporean organizations. They did not even want to listen, since they wanted to do it ‘their’ way. Isn’t it too bad that lives are being lost as politics is being played.
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